the times | Friday April 8 2022 2GM 31
Leading articles
Some expansion of nuclear is certainly necessa-
ry. But the government offered no analysis of why
Britain had succeeded in starting construction on
just one new reactor in the 16 years since Tony
Blair announced a nuclear renaissance. Nor was
there any detail on how the government proposes
to unblock these unidentified obstacles. What is
certain is this new nuclear programme will not
bring energy bills down any time soon, if ever. In-
stead it will push bills up as the costs of construc-
tion are passed on to consumers. Nor will it do
much in the near term to reduce Britain’s reliance
on Russian oil and gas given that it takes at least a
decade to build a nuclear power station.
What will bring bills down and reduce reliance
on Russian hydrocarbons, as well as help meet
emissions targets, is a big expansion of renew-
ables. Yet here too the “strategy” was light on de-
tail. The fastest and cheapest way to deliver such
an expansion would be to encourage the develop-
ment of onshore wind. Yet the government ruled
out any changes to the strict planning rules that
have effectively blocked onshore wind in England
over the past decade, despite polling evidence that
it is popular. Instead it merely promised to “consult
on developing local partnerships for a limited
number of supportive communities”.What the government is proposing is a fivefold
increase in offshore wind, with a raised target of
50GW of capacity by 2030. That is certainly an
ambitious goal that would give Britain enough
capacity to power every home. Is it achievable?
The industry thought the previous target of
40GW by 2030 was a stretch. The government
says it intends to cut the consent time from four
years to one. That will require changes to the plan-
ning rules of the sort it has ruled out for onshore
wind, given that offshore requires significant land-
based infrastructure too. Rather than provide de-
tailed policies and a clear road map, the govern-
ment promises taskforces and reviews.
Yet what was most striking about the strategy
was what was left out. It had little to say about re-
ducing energy demand, despite acknowledging in
the introduction that improving energy efficiency
is “the first step” towards meeting the objectives.
What is needed are innovative policies to acceler-
ate domestic insulation and take-up of clean tech-
nologies, such as heat pumps and rooftop solar, by
reducing the expense for homeowners and allow
the costs to be recouped via energy bills. Instead
the government has left improving energy effi-
ciency up to individual households. That is not a
strategy. It’s a cop-out.members on the performance of cabinet members
published this week showed Mr Sunak had
slumped to second from bottom with an approval
score of minus 8.
Now Mr Sunak’s approval ratings look certain
to slump even further after revelations that his
wife, Akshata Murty, daughter of an Indian bil-
lionaire, took advantage of her non-domicile sta-
tus to avoid paying British tax on her worldwide
earnings. This is the second embarrassing story
relating to his wife’s financial affairs to emerge in
recent weeks following news that Ms Murty re-
mains a significant shareholder in her father’s
business, Infosys, which at the time was continu-
ing to do business in Russia. That story appeared
just hours after police started handing out the first
fines for law-breaking at Downing Street. Mr Sun-
ak could be forgiven for wondering if this was “a
politically motivated hit job designed to cause
maximum damage”, as one of his allies said.
Regardless of the motivation behind the leak,
the story is damaging to Mr Sunak because it so
obviously raises questions about his judgment. It is
simply not true, as Ms Murty tried to imply in adisingenuous statement, that she faced a choice
between paying UK tax on her worldwide income
and renouncing her Indian citizenship. Like every
other Indian citizen resident in Britain, she has a
choice every year when filling out her tax return
whether to opt to pay British tax on her worldwide
income like the overwhelming majority of British
residents, or take advantage of her non-domicile
status, based on her Indian parentage, to pay tax
only on her British income.
That she chose the latter option, as many rich
foreign residents do, presumably to lower her
overall tax bill, is her right and entirely legal. Yet it
was surely naive of Mr Sunak to imagine he could
keep this secret, nor that it would be perceived by
the public when it did emerge as a conflict of inter-
est, not least when his immediate family was bene-
fiting from what is a historical loophole in the tax
system at a time when he is putting up taxes for
ordinary families. The danger for Mr Sunak and
indeed for the government is this will simply re-
inforce the most damaging narrative about the
Conservatives: that it is one rule for them and
another for everyone else.took to reach us. It is almost as old, given a few
hundred million years, as the explosion some 13.8
billion years ago known as the Big Bang. From an
unimaginably small, dense and hot single point,
the universe came into being and expanded huge-
ly within a tiny fraction of a second. Eventually
particles, atoms, molecules, stars, planets and gal-
axies formed, held together by the force of gravity.
Our star, the sun, is only about 4.5 billion years
old. HD1 was formed not long after the cosmic
dark ages, a period of 100 to 180 million years
before the first stars were born. The team that
spotted HD1 will use the James Webb Space Tele-scope, the most advanced observatory yet built, to
learn more about it. The work may yield clues to
what the universe was like in its earliest history. It
already tells us something about our own species.
Humans have always been fascinated by the
night sky, but only when Galileo invented the as-
tronomical telescope did it become possible to
measure the motion of distant planets and moons,
and work out the laws governing their orbits. Little
more than 400 years later, his successors can see
back almost to the earliest stars. Finding HD1 is
testament not only to humans’ capacity for won-
der but also to their thirst for discovery.Wasted Energy
The government’s energy security strategy was long on eye-catching targets and
short on plans to achieve them, while having nothing to say about efficiency
Is that really the best that the government could
do? Weeks after it was first promised, the much-
anticipated energy security strategy review was fi-
nally published yesterday. This was expected to
provide answers to the three pressing challenges
facing energy policy, made more urgent by
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how to lower house-
hold energy bills that have soared to levels that
threaten the greatest cost of living crisis for 50
years; how to reduce Britain’s reliance on import-
ed Russian oil and gas; and how to reduce Britain’s
dependence on fossil fuels sufficiently to achieve
its legally binding target of net zero emissions by- Yet what was published amounted to little
more than a glorified press release.
The most eye-catching announcement was an
aspiration to approve “up to eight new nuclear re-
actors” this decade. The goal is that nuclear should
deliver 24GW of electricity by 2050, a quarter of
projected demand. Yet there was no explanation
as to why this target had been chosen, when inde-
pendent analyses by the National Infrastructure
Commission, National Grid and Climate Change
Committee have concluded that only three plants
are needed to provide Britain’s future base load
electricity. The number eight appears to have been
plucked out of the air.
Tax Tangle
The chancellor is damaged by revelations of his wife’s non-domiciled status
Just a few weeks ago, Rishi Sunak’s fortunes were
riding high. The chancellor’s assured performance
steering the economy through the pandemic had
made him one of the most popular members of
the cabinet. As Boris Johnson’s political difficulties
deepened over the Downing Street parties, he
was seen as one of the leading candidates to suc-
ceed him should the prime minister’s position be-
come untenable. Mr Sunak may even have har-
boured such ambitions himself, judging by his
lukewarm support for Mr Johnson when news first
broke that the prime minister himself may have
been at some of the parties.
Yet Mr Sunak’s chances of succeeding Mr John-
son look much-diminished now. The chancellor’s
standing among Conservative MPs had already
taken a battering when he insisted that the gov-
ernment break its manifesto commitment by rais-
ing taxes to pay for increased spending on health
and social care. Meanwhile his standing with the
public has tumbled in the wake of a spring state-
ment last month that did little to help the poorest
families in the midst of the deepest cost of living
crisis since the 1950s. A poll of Conservative PartyFirst Things
Astronomers have spotted a galaxy going back to the Big Bang
“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitch-
hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Really big. You just
won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly
big it is.” It certainly is, as a team of astronomers
has shown. Using Earth-based and space tele-
scopes, they have spotted a galaxy, dubbed HD1,
whose light has travelled for 13.5 billion years to
reach Earth. It is the farthest object yet identified.
When astronomers observe distant objects,
they are looking into the past. By analysing the
redness of the light from HD1, showing how much
it was stretched as it journeyed through the ex-
panding universe, they can calculate how long itUK: Boris Johnson hosts Olaf Scholz, the
German chancellor, at Downing Street.
World: Karl Lauterbach, the German health
minister, leads a G7 videoconference.
Deep in the woods a
vein of gold glints in
the shadows. But
this is no precious
metal, it’s a flower
— opposite-leaved
golden saxifrage.
Seen singly, opposite-leaved golden saxifrage
is not particularly memorable. Low growing,
its leaves are blunt-toothed and its small
yellow flowers lack petals. But the plant
forms spreading mats that can cover large
areas, and these colonies gleam like spilt
gold in the shady woodland understorey.
More common in the western reaches of
Britain, opposite-leaved golden saxifrage
loves wet ground and fills beck sides, bogs,
flushes, mires and seeps. In the soggiest
places, its rare relative, alternate-leaved
golden saxifrage, sometimes grows alongside
it. Opposite-leaved golden saxifrage is the
county flower of Clackmannanshire.
jonathan tulloch
In 1908 Herbert Henry Asquith became
prime minister, having travelled alone to
meet Edward VII in Biarritz. The Liberal
Party leader tendered his resignation on
December 5, 1916.
Robin Wright, pictured,
actress, House of Cards
(2013-18), 56; Baroness
(Ros) Altmann, pensions
minister (2015-16), 66;
Patricia Arquette,
actress, True Romance
(1993), 54; Mark
Blundell, racing driver, winner of the 24
Hours of Le Mans (1992), 56; Andrew RT
Davies, AM for South Wales Central, leader
of the Welsh Conservative Party, National
Assembly for Wales (2011-18), 54; Evan
Davis, presenter, PM (BBC Radio 4) and
Dragons’ Den (BBC2), 60; Michelle
Donelan, Conservative MP for
Chippenham, minister for higher and
further education, 38; Seymour Hersh,
investigative journalist, exposed the My Lai
Massacre and its cover-up during the
Vietnam War, 85; Steve Howe, rock
guitarist, Yes, Roundabout (1972), 75; Barbara
Kingsolver, author, Unsheltered (2018), 67;
Julian Lennon, musician, Everything
Changes (2011), 59; John Madden, film
director, Shakespeare in Love (1998), The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), 73; Sir
John Parker, chairman, Laing O’Rourke,
Anglo-American plc (2009-17), president,
Royal Academy of Engineering (2011-14), 80;
David Pickard, director, BBC Proms,
general director, Glyndebourne Opera
(2001-15), 62; Chris Rapley, professor of
climate science, University College London,
chairman, European Space Sciences
Committee, director, Science Museum
(2007-10), 75; John Schneider, actor, The
Dukes of Hazzard (1979-85), 62; Alec
Stewart, England cricket captain (1998-99),
59; Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist,
Department of Health and Social Care, 61;
Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion
designer, 81; Baroness (Barbara) Young of
Old Scone, chairwoman, Royal Veterinary
College and the Woodland Trust, chief
executive, Diabetes UK (2010-15), 74.
“Only the fight against impunity can break the
spiral of violence.” Denis Mukwege,
Congolese gynaecologist and campaigner
against rape in warfare, Nobel lecture (2018)
Nature notes
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